This week’s movie releases

After tricksy Spanish period thriller Agnosia (2010), Eugenio Mira returns to the English language with his third feature, Grand Piano, which stars Elijah Wood as a concert pianist returning to play in public for the first time after suffering an on-stage breakdown five years before. And this time his nerves are about to be really put to the test as psycho John Cusack threatens to kill him and his wife if he so much as messes up a single note of his performance. Co-produced by Rodrigo Cortés, the movie has received comparisons to the Spanish director's coffin-set thriller Buried as well as Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Nat Faxon and Jim Rash penned Alexander Payne's excellent comedy drama The Descendants and now they're stepping behind the camera themselves with The Way Way Back, a coming-of-age comedy starring Liam James as an introverted teenager on vacation with mom Toni Collette and brash boyfriend Steve Carell, who finds a friend in the outgoing owner of the local water park, Sam Rockwell.

There's more American comedy in The Heat, which offers a female twist on the buddy cop genre as straight-laced FBI agent Sandra Bullock and rude and crude Boston detective Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids ) are forced to team up to bring down a drug baron.

Insidious: Chapter 2 sees Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne reprise their roles as the husband and wife seeking to uncover the secret that has left their family so closely connected to the spirit world. Director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, creators of the Saw franchise, ladle on the horror clichés, from ghosts in Victorian garb to possessed baby monitors and an eerily sung version of Row, Row, Row Your Boat.

Blue movie?

Winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, writer, director and producer Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour is the story of 15-year-old Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and her romance with blue-haired art student Emma (Léa Seydoux). Featuring some explicit sex scenes, the film is based on Julie Maroh's graphic novel Blue Angel.

A double Palme d'Or winner himself, as well as this year's recipient of the Prince of Asturias Award for the arts, director Michael Haneke has the camera turned back on himself in Michael H. Yves Montmayeur's documentary attempts to get behind the Austrian director's creative process using on-set footage (Montmayeur has filmed many of the making-ofs for Haneke's films) and interviews with regular collaborators, such as Isabelle Huppert and Juliette Binoche.